


What Is This Feeling?

by AlwaysSpeaksHerMind



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: A little fluffy, And a little awkward, Caitlin Returns, F/M, Feelings, Mild Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Romance, Sorting out of feelings, canon compliant(ish)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 04:24:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11751942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysSpeaksHerMind/pseuds/AlwaysSpeaksHerMind
Summary: Caitlin returns to STAR Labs with some newfound clarity. During her Killer Frost-induced absence, there was one person she missed above all others. Now, she just has to let him know that.





	What Is This Feeling?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VVSIGNOFTHECROSS](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VVSIGNOFTHECROSS/gifts).



> (Note: there's no mention of Julian in here simply because I couldn't figure out how to work him in/explain his absence, and right around that time, I heard Tom Felton wasn't going to be on the show anymore, so I decided to just ignore all that.)

            She didn’t know what she expected to find when she returned to Central City. Certainly not an absent Barry or a (for all intents and purposes) splintered Team Flash. But to be honest, what shocked her most when she turned up at STAR labs, feeling a great deal as though she were skulking, was the change she saw in the one person she’d missed above all others. He’d still been the first to run to her—and considering that both Wally and Jesse were in the room at the time, that was really saying something—and he had been the first to hug her, but all the same, he was different, and it bothered her. Because he’d been through a lot of things in his life, and yet somehow, Cisco Ramon had remained the same. Humor was usually his go-to mechanism for warding off pain or trouble, but there hadn’t been any of that this time, and it worried her.

            So when he announced that he was going to stay late to work on the suits, she lingered. She wasn’t sure what excuse she gave; she just knew that it was probably really flimsy because Joe gave her a look that seemed a little too understanding, and even Harry laid a brief hand on her shoulder as he passed. Although she could have been imagining it. Harry had clearly made great strides in his empathy game, but Caitlin was confident in her belief that he’d never be anyone’s first choice for a therapist.

            And speaking of therapy, she thought, listening to the sounds of pinging metal drifting toward her from down the hall, she could do with some of that herself.

And unless she was greatly mistaken, so could someone else.

            “Cisco?” she said cautiously, stepping into the perpetually messy lab. “Can we talk?”

            He paused mid-swing, a small hammer poised in the air above whatever little device he was working on at the moment, and it struck her with a funny little pang that she used to know exactly what kind of projects he had underway.

            “Yeah,” he responded slowly. “Sure. I mean, do we still…do that?”

            “Of course.” Caitlin clasped her hands together, taking a deep breath. “Or…I’d like to, anyway. Very much.”

            “Okay.” He nodded, poking pieces of scrap around on the table with the end of the hammer. “Well, uh…what, what do you want to talk about, because it’s been…” Trailing off, he leveled a hand horizontally through the air.

            “Six months?” she supplied, smiling softly.

            “I was gonna say a while, but…yeah.” Cisco stuck out a lip, nodding thoughtfully. “It has been six months, Dr. Snow. Kinda thought things might be different now.”

            She didn’t miss the way his eyes flitted over the not-quite-hidden streaks of white in her hair and almost on instinct, she reached up to tug at it.

            “I missed you, you know,” she told him abruptly. “Every single day I was gone.”

            “Yeah, me too.” Rubbing his hands nervously over his jeans, he grinned at her. “I maybe even called you a few times. Not like, on your phone or anything…like actually called your name and stuff.” He laughed sheepishly. “I guess I got kinda in the habit of having you around all these years.”

            Something deep within her shifted at the moroseness of the words juxtaposed with the lightness in his tone, and she had to force herself to smile. The irony of the fact that she’d become a doctor to help people—to make them stop hurting—and had somehow managed to hurt him more than anyone else in the whole entire world wasn’t lost on her.

            “Cisco, I’m sorry I left,” she said, picking up a wrench from the pile of tools near his elbow and fiddling with it.

            “What?” His head lifted and he stared at her, eyes wide. “Why?”

            She sighed. “Because I left you.”

            “What?” he said again, blankly. “Cait, I—you don’t have to apologize for something like that! You needed to figure out what was going on with you! I mean that’s, tha-ha-hats…” He waved the hand holding the hammer in the air, laughing uneasily.

            Caitlin plucked the tool from his hand before he accidentally gave himself a concussion brandishing it around like that. “That’s something I needed to do, and which I don’t regret,” she finished, clearing a spot on the desk and propping herself against it so she could face him. “But I do regret the way I went about it.”

            “Again, why?” he demanded, voice rising. “You were freaking I don’t know, Queen Frostine for a while there! Anybody’d need recovery time after that, so why are you beating yourself up?”

            “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

            Reaching down, she squeezed his hand. She nearly released it after a few seconds out of habit, but she hadn’t come this far to give up now. During the last year she’d done a lot of thinking, and there was something she had to say to him now or lose her nerve—maybe forever.

            “Cisco, what I’m trying to say is,” she began, an all-too unfamiliar heat creeping up her neck as he looked up sharply, “you’ve been my best friend for years. You’ve always been there for me, and the whole time I was gone, I kept wanting to talk to you, to just…ask you questions.”

_Breathe, Caitlin. Just breathe_.

             “I—” She broke off, twisting a bracelet around her wrist. This was definitely harder than she’d expected it to be. Focusing her gaze on the ground, she sternly ordered herself to pull it together. “Cisco, I had a lot of time to think while I was away. And I realized how much I count on you, and how much I’ve taken that for granted these past few years.”

            Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him make a sudden, jerky movement that she knew meant he was nervous.

            “What do you mean?” he asked finally, his voice just above a whisper.

            “I mean…” She took another deep breath. “Cisco, you’re really important to me. And the thing is…I don’t think I actually knew how much until I went away.”

            A small frown built ridges across his forehead, and Caitlin held herself very still as he looked down at his hands. She wasn’t sure she was making herself clear, but how else was she supposed to go about it? It frustrated her that she couldn’t seem to do better at it when she’d basically built her entire life on the premise that hard work equaled improved results, but there was no help for it.

            When a minute or so went by in complete silence, she gave up. Because first and foremost, he was her best friend, and not answering was just _rude_.

            “Cisco!” she blurted out finally, impatience and exasperation coloring her tone. “I’m trying to tell you that I like you. The least you could do is look at me.”

            She half-expected an argument, so it took her a little by surprise when his head almost flew up and she saw the tension in his face.

            “If you’re trying to make a joke, Cait, I gotta tell you, it’s not very funny,” he mumbled.

            A joke? He thought she was joking?

            Caitlin straightened. Hands on hips, she stared him down. “Cisco Ramon, I know I had an icicle for a heart most of the last few times we talked to each other, but do you really think I’d joke about something like this? Me?”

            “Well, I—” he started, but she cut him off.

            “You know, while I was gone, I had a lot of time to get acquainted with the Killer Frost side of me. I spent so long trying to run from it—pretending that it was someone else, that it was a disease I had to cure, that I missed the obvious. There is no Killer Frost. There’s just Caitlin. Caitlin with powers, and this, this harsh, ice-cold bitterness that I’ve been tamping down for years, ever since my dad died. Killer Frost is nothing more than the voice in my head telling me to give up, to stop caring, to not feel. And you know what? I don’t have to listen to that voice. That’s what I learned. But the other thing I took away from that whole ordeal is that life is too short—too precious to waste being a coward.” She took a deep breath. “So, I’m going to take a chance now and say this because I’ve got to get it off my chest. I care a lot about you, Cisco. Not just as my friend, but—in a non-friend way. I-I have feelings for you. I think I have for a while.”

            For one horrible moment she thought something had happened and he hadn’t heard. But then he made a funny sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough and raised his eyes to hers.

            “You’re serious?” he asked.

            “Yes.” Was it just her or was he…crying? “Cisco, are you all right?” she queried, concern rising.

            “I don’t…know” came the vague response. But then a grin the likes of which she hadn’t seen since he was the newbie at STAR Labs bloomed across his face and sent a whole wave of emotions she couldn’t even begin to describe through her. “You’re serious,” he repeated, only it wasn’t a question this time.

            Trying—and failing—to control her smile, Caitlin nodded. “I’m serious.”

            “Wow.” His hands fluttered up to tuck some hair that really didn’t need to be tucked behind his ears. “Uh, so where does uh, this put us, exactly?”

            “I’m not sure,” she answered, lifting a shoulder as her smile finally escaped. “I don’t really know how you feel, so…”

            “Oh, come on, Caitlin.” Rolling his eyes, Cisco stood up, his sarcastic inflection not quite matching the softness in his face. “If you don’t know how I feel about you by now, what good is my telling you gonna do?”

            Her lips twitched, and even though it wasn’t all that funny, she burst out laughing. “Well, it might be nice to hear,” she teased, trying not to fidget now that they were maybe two and half feet apart. “Just so I don’t have to be the only uncomfortable one here.”

            “Well, then. If I may…ahem.” Clearing his throat with a quick raise of the eyebrows, he grinned. “Caitlin Snow, I have feelings for you, too. I never said anything because you’re my best friend, and anyway, I pretty much suck at relationships, but if you’re willing to give me a shot, I will do my absolute best to actually be good at one.”

            “Deal. And ditto.”

            Before she had a chance to talk herself out of it, she stepped forward and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.

            “Sorry, sorry,” she stammered, backing away when she felt him stiffen. “I didn’t mean to freak you out!” Ugh, she was turning red, wasn’t she? Great. Just _great._ “You know what, let’s just...talk the rest of this out tomorrow, huh?” she suggested, gesturing vaguely with her hands, and oh God, had her hands always looked that big and awkward? “Why don’t you tell me what you’re working on, so I can help?”

            “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a, ah…a good…yeah, let’s do that.” Nodding vigorously, Cisco reached up to tuck his hair behind his ears again, clearly forgetting that there was no hair to be tucked since he’d already done that. “Um, _so._ I’ve been working on this device for Wally’s suit. I mean, Barry’s suit. I mean—well, you know what I mean. And then I got this idea for a way that we can maybe try to get Barry back, but I don’t want to tell anyone about it until I know whether or not it’ll work, because—yeah, you can probably guess the because. And the whys, too. Anyway.”

            Coming around to join her at the desk, he kept up a steady, nonstop stream of talking that was somehow more comfortable and calming than all the silence in the world. And for the next three hours—a three hours that she could’ve sworn were maybe only thirty minutes—Caitlin gave herself permission to relax.

            So when, during a fight with a particularly stubborn screw, she felt a soft kiss on her cheek, she jumped.

            “Sorry,” Cisco said sheepishly in answer to her unasked question. “I probably should’ve done that earlier. I was just—kind of trying to get up the nerve for a while.”

            Caitlin smiled, the wild impulse to giggle rising until she had to practically force it down. “That’s okay,” she answered, biting her lip to try to rein in her wide grin. “I liked it.”

            “Really?” He grinned back, looking an awful lot like the Cheshire Cat.

            “Really,” she answered.

            “Huh.” He snuck a sly glance at her, the _I'm about to make a terrible joke_ twinkle in his eye. “Cool.”

            _Yep,_ she thought, shaking her head at him even as she laughed.  _Some things never change._

            And boy, was she glad they didn't.

**Author's Note:**

> VVSIGNOFTHECROSS, I am SO sorry for how long this took to post! I tried to keep it as close to canon as possible, and then new Flash news kept coming out so I kept revising, and then my writing/editing time kept getting interrupted by unexpected visitors. Not sure how successful the whole undisguised-feelings thing was, but I tried. Thanks for the prompt! I enjoyed writing this and it kind of sent my Flash speculations into hyperdrive <3
> 
> (Also: apologies if this wasn't quite what you were expecting. Frankly, it didn't come out at all how I was expecting and I can't for the life of me figure out why, so let me know if it needs an epilogue or something :D)


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